Claus Offe
"Institutions' role in the distribution and control of social power"
(draft paper prepared for the conference on "Crafting and Operating Institutions", Yale University, April 11-13, 2003)
The question that this paper will focus on is the implications of institutions for the distribution,
exercise, and control of social power. The question can be elaborated with the help of a quote
from Sven Steinmo, one of the initiators (with K. Thelen) of the research program of "historical
institutionalism". Steinmo writes:
"Institutions define the rules of the political game and as such they define who can play
and how they play… [institutions] can shape who wins and who loses." (IESBS
2001:7555)
If we replace in this sentence the term "institutions" with the word "power" or "holders of social
power", the meaning remains virtually the same. "Institutions" and "power", or so it seems, are
being used interchangeably. But that cannot be right, as "holders of power" are clearly actors,
while institutions are not. What I want to explore here are the mechanisms through which institutions affect the distribution of social power among actors.
To this end, I shall start with (1) a set of propositions on which social scientists (including economists) studying institutions seem to be largely agreed. These propositions refer to structural
feature of all institutions (or of subgroups that form types of institutions). In the next section of
my paper I turn to (2) the functions that institutions are supposed to perform. Section (3) of the
paper deals with the capacity of institutions to endow actors with power and privilege and various trajectories of challenge and change of institutions. It is a sheer coincidence that each of
these three sections is subdivided into eight propositions.
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(1) The structure of institutions
(a) Institutions are systems of rules that that apply to future behavior: they constitute actors and
pro-/prescribe their scope and mode of action. Institutions often impose incisive restrictions on
what actors will be permitted to do. In contrast, regularities are propositions based upon the observation of patterns in past events which do not have, by themselves, normative implications.
(b) Institutions differ from conventions in that the rules that they consist of are contested. While
it makes no sense to challenge the QWERT-convention of organizing characters on a keyboard
(as it is self-enforcing the moment it is adopted), institutions can meaningfully be challenged.
This potential challenge must be neutralized through an enforcement agency. Formal institutions
need guardians.
(c) Institutions differ from traditions or habits in that those involved in them show a reflexive
awareness of their presence and the institutions' claim to validity. For instance, institutions and
the system of rules of which they consist are codified in law books and other books, they can be
taught and theorized, reasons can be given for the validity of these rules and the bindingness with
which they shape the action of actors, etc.
(d) Most institutions come with an implicit theory about themselves that provides reasons for
their support and defense. They are embedded in a set of legitimizing ideas or ideologies.
(e) Institutions precede the action of actors in time. They are premises of action. They are not
created on the spot (as contracts are), but are "given" in the sense that less contingency applies to
institutions than to actions. Contracts themselves, as a form that governs major parts of social
interaction, have the institutional quality of precluding the option of not using this form if actors
want to put themselves in control of some kinds of valued goods or services. This quality of being inescapably "given" is what made Durkheim speak of the "non-contractual" features of contracts, of "social facts", etc. ("chosisme")
(f) In contrast to organizations, institutions do not have founders or authors. Rather than as a
result of individual decisions, they come into being due to some manifestation of "communicative power" (Habermas, Arendt) They "emerge" anonymously under certain conditions and con-
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texts which later historians then usually explain as having contributed to the specific shape of an
institution. There may have been heroes, protagonists, or prophets, as well as theorists who elaborate and explain the reasons for the validity of an institution. But in order for an institution to
make the transition from an idea, a blueprint, or a vision to an actually existing social arrangement, the set of rules, forms and constraints must "sink in", "take roots", "make sense" and meet
with the recognition and support of those who come to live with and under the institution in
question. Institutions have less to do with strategy, choice, instrumental intentionality (as organizations do) and more with emergence, growth, and intrinsic valuation. (cf. Knight 1992) Institutions are part of "public knowledge", even of those who are unfamiliar with particular organizations that form instances of institutions. Even if I never attend church or a stock exchange, I still
have an idea of what these institutions are thought to be good for and how people will act when
being involved in the institution.1
(g) Institutions regulate the distribution of values the access to which and the distribution of
which are intensely contested. (Offe 1995) The access to wealth and income, the control of physical violence, the recognition of individuals as belonging to a group, authority over and solidarity
within the group, sexual relations, generational relations, the access to social and physical security, health, education, knowledge, esthetic values, and spiritual salvation are all items on a list of
potential conflicts in which the stakes can be very high. Institutions can best be thought of as
regimes that regulate the productions and distribution of these and other values; which is why
they are the potential object of distributive conflict initiated by actors who propose a different
pattern of allocating those values.
(h) Theorists have proposed typologies of institutions. Such typologies can be based on institutional fields and their respective core values (religion /salvation, schools/education). They can
also proceed along the formal/informal or legal/moral/ethical divide. (North 1990) Or they can
proceed according to a hierarchy of "basic" institutions (such as constitutions), intermediary institutions (statutory laws) and operative institutions (administrative decrees). (Ostrom 1990: 50-
1
"One of the main features of institutional rules is that they are socially shared. The knowledge of their existence
and applicability is shared by the members of the relevant group or community." (Knight 1992:68)
3
5) Such hierarchies usually imply a hierarchy of robustness, or resistance to change, as in the
hierarchy of political community, regime form, and legislation (Easton) or the hierarchy of policies (P. Hall)
(2) functions of institutions
(a) Institutions shape actors' motivational dispositions (Parsons); goals and procedures will be
"internalized" by actors, and they will adopt goals, procedures, and interpretations of the situation that are congruent with the institutional patterns. Institutions shape actors so that they (many
or even most of them) will take these institutions for granted and comply with their rules. Institutions have a formative or motivation building impact upon actors.
(b) By virtue of this formative effect, as well as the shaping of actors' expectations, institutions
can provide for predictability, regularity, stability, integration, discipline, and cooperation. In the
absence of institutions, actors would not be able to make strategic choices, because they would
lack the information about what kind of action to expect from others, which they need to know in
order to pursue their own benefit. (Knight, ch. 3) More broadly and regardless of the special case
of strategic action, institutions fulfill a requirement, as philosophical anthropologists (Gehlen)
have argued, that results from a basic and constitutive deficiency of human nature: Human beings are not only naked in the literal sense (and therefore in need of clothing and shelter); they
are also "naked" in the metaphorical sense that they are lacking instinct-based behavioral programs which would provide them with guidance in coping with the physical and social world. As
human behavior is not naturally governed by any regularity (as it is supposedly the case with all
animals), humans, in order to cope with their "fearsome naturalness" (Gehlen), need rules (or
"culture") to compensate for this deficiency. Freudian social psychology ("Civilization And Its
Discontents") follows a similar idea of "requisite repression", an idea which has later come to be
challenged by the Freudian left (Adorno, Marcuse) and complemented by the notion of institutions performing not just the function of "necessary", but beyond that of unnecessary or "surplus" repression.
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(c) In particular, institutions increase the efficiency of transactions as they help to economize on
search, negotiation, and enforcement costs of market and non-market interaction. (North, 1990)
(d) Institutions shape action by providing opportunities and incentives to actors so that a spontaneous order (kosmos, or spontaneous regularities vs. taxis, or intentionally designed rules) results
(Hayek 1973, Foucault). For instance, market institutions inculcate such virtues as prudence,
diligence, punctuality, self-control, and self-attribution of both success and failure, thereby triggering spontaneous patterns of self-coordination. Rather than prescribing a particular course of
action, institutions focus the attention of actors on what is relevant and irrelevant, what preferences are to be pursued, what resources employed, etc. Institutions "act on the manner in which
[individuals] regulate their own behavior", which is why the institutionalization of liberty
through "liberalism [represents] a specific rationality of government", which cultivates "suitable
habits of self-regulation". (Hindess 2001:2, 4, 11)
(e) By virtue of their formative impact upon individuals as well as their contribution to social
order, institutions can be self-perpetuating: The longer they are in place, the more robust they
grow, and the more immune they become to challenges. They establish premises, constraints,
and determinants for future developments. ("path dependency")
(f) Yet institutions can also fail and break down. One way in which this may happen is the
change of conditions in the eternal world which undermine the viability of institutional patterns,
or its ability to function. If that happens, rules and institutionalized goals are rendered untenable.
An example is the assumption, built in into the institutional pattern of wage bargaining, that
semi-centralized multi-employer bargaining ("Flächentarifvertrag") will in the long term converge with the interests of both workers and employers as well as enhance the productivity and
competitiveness of the economy as a whole. However, labor market crises, regional disparities,
international competition etc. have shattered this presumed equilibrium of interests. Another example is the institutions of family life in African society the rules of which prescribe that the care
for young children must be taken over by specific members of the wider family in (the relatively
rare) case these children become orphans. However, as a direct consequence of the HIV epidemic, this case ceases to be rare, and the family-based institutions of vicarious care turn out to be
5
overburdened and begin to break down. These are examples of how institutions lose their "fit"
with the (economic, demographic, etc.) external context conditions on which they depend.
(g) The other case of "path-departure" and institutional breakdown originates from the failure, or
loss of moral plausibility, of the implicit theory of a just social order that comes with any institution. Institutions can implode due a shortage of the moral resources and loyalties that are needed
for their support. For instance, the notion of a just gender division of labor congealed in the
"male breadwinner family" pattern has come under pressure from individualist and egalitarian
normative ideas. The same syndrome of normative ideas has made the "collectivist consensus"
falter on which the Bismarckian institutions of contributory pay-as-you-go old age pensions are
based. Here, we observe the breakdown of institutions due to their internal loss of a sense of
"appropriateness" (March and Olsen, 1989) and justice. (In the conceptual jargon of sociologists,
the two cases (f) and (g) can be labeled "crisis" vs. "conflict", or failure of systems integration vs.
failure of social integration, respectively.)
(h) In either of these two cases of institutional transformation, institutions undergo a Gestalt
switch: What used to be seen and taken for granted as a valid and well-functioning arrangement
is now being looked upon and criticized as a pattern that represents a frozen power structure inherited from a distant and now obsolete past. For instance, the privileged position of the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council is due to the fact that these five states are the
victorious powers of the Second World War who also share among them a monopoly of the (legitimate) possession of nuclear weapons. However, both the post-WWII configuration of the
international system and the Cold War have become a matter of the past, and the nuclear monopoly has become entirely nominal and increasingly fictitious. Moreover, one of the permanent
members can now afford, due to its unparalleled military power, to ignore and bypass Security
Council decisions. The entire arrangement can therefore be discredited as the unwarranted projection of past power relations into the present, thus cementing relations of power that cannot be
justified under present conditions any longer. (cf. P. Anderson)
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(3) social power, as provided by institutions and as challenging institutions
Social power manifests itself in a mode of action that has the effect of setting parameters for the
action of other social actors, be it in favorable or unfavorable ways, as seen by those others. In
either case, the exercise of power will be conflictual, controversial, and contested. In this conflict, some legitimating norm of (political, social, economic) justice is invoked and appealed to.
The execize of power affects others in ways that are perceived by them to be justice-relevant.
Given the controversial and essentially contested nature of standards of justice, I take it as axiomatic that virtually any institution can be criticized for failing to live up to some version of justice. Note that this definition of power excludes two (arguably entirely fictive) phenomena that
played a role in 19th century political thought. First, "administration of things" (as opposed to
"rule over men"; Saint-Simon, Engels) which supposedly affects objects other than social actors;
second, the exclusively private and self-referential action that is of not consequence at all to other actors (Mill, Liberty).
Any formal institution involves three kinds of power. First, it relies on the power of policing and
enforcement agents, or guardians, including the socialization agents, media, etc. who perform
tasks of the educational propagation of institutional patterns and related ideas. Second, and as I
have alluded to in the last paragraph of the previous section, institutions preserve power relations
as they contain patterns of privilege, power, and control which are biased in favor of some actors
in some institutional field and work to the disadvantage of others. Third, there is the virtual power of those who might have reasons (for instance, reasons following from 2(f) or (g)), to actively
obstruct and challenge institutional patterns and replace them with new ones. This triad of power
phenomena that is interwoven in institutional patterns can be illustrated using the famous line by
Bertolt Brecht (Three Penny Opera, 9th scene) who lets one of his protagonists ask the rhetorical
question: "What is breaking into a bank compared to founding a bank?" The robbing of a bank is
an act which obviously the enforcement agents and guardians are called upon to deal with. The
(by Brecht's implication, far greater) "crime" of founding and operating a bank is the power
structure embedded in the institution of banking, namely the power with which the institution of
banking endows some economic actors at the expense of other actors. But Brecht's speech act
that puts matters in this way makes sense only in a "revolutionary" perspective--a perspective,
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that is, which envisions the exercise of a kind of power which would be capable of overpowering
the institutional pattern that is represented by the "bank" and replacing it with some different
kind of social and economic arrangement.
The examples given in (2h) have already highlighted the implicit benefits and discriminatory
effects that are built into, hidden by and preserved through the operation of institutions. Institutions endow actors with power and disempower others. They place players in a position that allows them to take unfair advantage of others, or exclude them from the making of decisions that
affect them in significant ways (or whatever other justice-related complaint may be raised
against them). The generalization that I want to suggest is a model according to which institutions operate in a tripolar field of power conflicts that unfold between the guardians (P1), beneficiaries (P2) who are endowed with power over others, and potential challengers (P3).
The dynamics of this power conflict surrounding institutions can range from vehement to imperceptible. The latter applies if an institution consists of a set of rules that nobody needs to enforce
because nobody violates it; that nobody can claim to involve unfair privilege or exclusion; and
that nobody finds worth criticizing or challenging. It is not easy, I submit, to think of an example
of an institution to which all of this applies and which is, in fact, an "institution", rather than a
widely shared habit or a perfectly self-enforcing convention. Perhaps equally rare are instances
of the other extreme of vehement contest. Which leads me to the question of how the three parties that are hypothetically involved in the dynamics of social power concerning institutional
rules manage, conceal, accommodate, disperse this conflict. What follows is a typology of situations and modes in which institutions cope with power related contests and challenges.
(a) Institutions in which the bias is not obvious to participants which empowers P2 at the expense of some excluded, discriminated, or misrepresented interest will escape any serious challenge coming from some P3, and particularly so if the guardians (P1) can point to allegedly universal and non-discriminatory incidence of benefits flowing from the institution. In this configuration, the power implications of the institutional pattern are a matter that is just being perceived
by the observer, rightly so or not.
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(b) Even if some bias in favor of P2 is widely perceived and objections concerning the justice of
the arrangement raised, the institutional rules and procedures may be such that an open and
promising challenge of the institutional pattern is not to be expected to have any chance of success; this may be so because a set of ideas and an institutional blueprint is missing on the basis of
which some critical force P3 might crystallize. This is the situation analyzed by theories of power which focus upon its "second" face (non-decisions and exclusionary agenda-setting; Bachrach
and Baratz) as well as its "third" face (manipulative interference with awareness of interests;
Lukes 1974; Gaventa). Challenging the (dis)empowering effects of the institution may appear
either unpromising, given the weakness of P3, or not "worth the effort", given the negative sanctions that are to be expected from P1.
(c) Some institutions are highly flexible and open to self-revision. Some 18th and 19th century
political thinkers believed it desirable to provide for a process of a radical ongoing "synchronization" of institutions (cf. Holmes), so that the legacy of unfair distributional patterns that is inherent in inherited institutions can be effectively neutralized. For instance, each time the assembly
comes together, it should affirm the validity of the constitution and alter it in case it is no longer
unanimously supported. After all, why should we, those presently alive, allow defunct generations to exercise power over us? But this solution is obviously deceptive, as the neutralization of
inherited unfairness would be tantamount to granting comfortable veto points to present holders
of social power. While the inherited playing field on which we find ourselves may be far from
level, treating it as a tabula rasa may well leave us in an even more tilted terrain. In that sense,
holding fast to inherited institutions and their effect of "long distance" self-binding can protect us
from the dangers of an overly direct impact of present power relations upon renovated institutions. This conservative approach would certainly not neutralize whatever empowering effects
are built into institutions; but it would at least help to preserve the potential of institutions for
creating predictability, stability, and economizing on transaction costs. The same logic applies to
the requirement of super majorities for institutional change. The advantage of synchronization
must be balanced against both the disadvantage of just empowering present holders of veto power and the disadvantage of unpredictability. Even highly unfair institutions may be able to command the loyalty and compliance of actors because these have reason to believe that any transi-
9
tion to better ones will be prohibitively costly and because existing institutions are at least familiar and reasonably calculable; they are "the best we have" and can hope for.2
An example of how an excessive flexibility of institutions can have quite dubious effects is the
opportunistic manipulation of electoral laws (cf. Boix 1999), i. e. laws which do not partake in
the rigidity accorded to constitutional rules proper. If every ruling party can use its majority to
push through parliament the mix of electoral rules that best serves its interest in being re-elected
under changing conditions of electoral competition, this strategy of opportunistically rewriting
institutional rules would hardly be seen as enhancing fairness. The same applies to governing
elites' self-serving manipulation of rules governing federalism (Nigeria, India) and devolution.
Institutions that can be opportunistically switched off and on, or altered in the pursuit of strategic
considerations, are an oxymoron. They perform the functions of institutions only if they are protected by a measure of "requisite rigidity" and are designed in accordance with principles (what I
have called their "implicit theory") which allows to value them for their intrinsic rather than their
instrumental value (if perhaps only because their long term causal effects are hidden behind a
veil of ignorance).
(d) A way out of this dilemma might be the reliance on mechanisms that allow for the institutionalization of institutional change, subjecting it to procedural constraints. All constitutions contain ("meta-")rules which specify the procedures according to which they can be amended and
changed. In addition, they often constitute agents, such as constitutional courts, and prescribe
rules with which any binding (re-)interpretation of formal institutions must comply. To be sure,
there is no guarantee that the space for self-revision thus provided, as well as the political determination to use it, will ever be sufficient to heal even the most blatant power privileges that are
built into institutional arrangements.3
2
It is this syndrome of beliefs on which the viability of state socialist authoritarian regimes depended and which
they have been able to effectively inculcate in their citizens.
3
For example, according to German constitutional jurisprudence the Grundgesetz does not permit the adoption
of a mode of financing tertiary education that would rely to a significant extent on the payment of tuition. As a
consequence, a condition is likely to remain immune to political challenge where not only the university system is massively underfunded, but where also the universe of tax payers subsidizes, with highly regressive dis-
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(e) Another option is to accommodate challenges and to neutralize any alleged power-content of
institutional forms is to provide for a choice of parallel institutional forms applying to the same
field of action (i. e. the coexistence of public and commercial mass media and schools, business
corporations and cooperatives, state and federal legislative competences), as well as the liberal
option of opting out (e. g., of the representational monopoly of trade unions or employers' associations). The power-neutralizing effect of these pluralization/liberalization options is, however,
bound to be limited at best, as the choices that are made available are likely to be used in ways
that reflect the status and privilege of those who make them, as in public health systems vs. private insurance.
Some institutions are more stringent than others. "Only in the limiting case will [institutions]
restrict the [feasible] set to one alternative. … The institution may establish the general parameters for the interaction (by excluding some strategies) but allow for considerable flexibility in the
choice of strategies within that framework." (Knight 1992:58-9) However, the actual range of
choice of individuals need not be greater in the second that in the first case, as the institutionally
mediated perception of the appropriate and normal mode of action may be so narrow and rigid
that actors spontaneously adopt a strict self-discipline (or "auto-governementality"), thus acting
as if the feasible set actually consisted of just one alternative.
(f) In rare cases, institutions show the capacity for accommodating challenges without thereby
exposing their core rules and actors to challenge. The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the
most impressive example of an institution that has been capable of preserving both the continuity
of the una sancta and continuous adjustment and self-revision. Another instance of the Lampedusa principle ("changing things so everything stays the same") is that of European monarchies:
they have shown an amazing capacity for being constitutionalized and democratized, so that,
arguably, today at least half of European consolidated democracies are in fact monarchies, not
republics. Similarly, the legal institutions that make up les droits de l'homme, while originally
destined to refer to the rights of French males, have gradually come to apply to all human beings.
It is at least not evident that today's liberal democracies belong to this small group of exceptiontributional effects, the human capital formation of the middle class whose offspring will continue to attend
universities for free.
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ally "ultra-stable" institutions, given the fact that the moral context condition of the nation state
and its sovereignty is in the process of evaporating. On the other hand, many liberal democracies
have at times shown great capacities for co-opting and incorporating both ideas and elites coming from those political forces who were most likely to challenge some given distribution of
power and privilege.
(g) Other institutions are even less capable of adjusting to challenges, although the need to respond to these challenges and the evidence of unfairness is widely understood. Yet institutions,
or those responsible for their management, are trapped in their obsession with continuity and
their refusal to concede change. This is well known in authoritarian regimes which sometimes
(have good reasons to) fear that concessions will lead to breakdown, while not taking into account that the failure to grant such concession will also lead to breakdown. The logic of this dilemma is not entirely absent from liberal democracies. To illustrate, let me return to the case of a
Bismarckian system of contributory old age pensions based upon contributions shared equally by
employers and employees. It is a well understood mathematical certainty that this system cannot
yield income-graduated pensions above the poverty line under conditions of a rapidly aging population with high levels of unemployment. It is also well understood that any attempted continuation of this system involves massive distributional injustices in favor of the retired and at the
expense of the presently active generation. Yet the electoral situation of any incumbent government makes it unfeasible (and politically virtually suicidal) to do either of the two things that
evidently need to be done: to cut the benefits of the retired generation and/or impose substantial
additional burdens (which will not be shared by the employers) upon the active generation, the
revenues from which can then serve to finance the transition to a funded system. In Germany,
this configuration of constraints has been known for 30 years; had a revision of the pension system been initiated in the mid seventies, the needed cuts in benefits and rises in contributions
might have been spread over time and painlessly absorbed. Yet liberal democracies (at least not
all of them) are not made for policies with a 30 year time horizon; instead, they are tied to medium term electoral cycles that provide strong incentives to dump the externalities of presently
unresolved problems onto future generations. These, in turn, become the victims of procrastination as they lack the time slack that is needed to cope with them.
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To be sure, this is an extreme case of democratic institutional rigidity and the incapacity to adopt
adequate and timely responses to challenges. But there are other examples of institutional arrangements being trapped in the sense that some paths are more difficult to depart from than others. The economic institutions of capitalist market societies can serve as an example of precluded
path-departure.4 As far as political institutions are concerned, let us consider the example of five
basic design alternatives of constitutional democracies. These are:
-
federalism vs. a unitary form of state,
-
direct democracy through referenda vs. parliamentary representation,
-
majority voting vs. proportional representation, and
-
parliamentary vs. presidentialism, as well as, in the context of European integration,
-
intergovernmentalism vs. supranational federalism.
The hypothetical argument I want to suggest (but cannot support here with any empirical evidence) is that the "transition probabilities" (or direction of entropy) between the first and the second of these design alternatives are asymmetrical. Some alterations of an institutional setup are
uphill, others downhill. That is to say: it is easily conceivable that the government of a centralized state finds it in its interest and manages to mobilize support to pursue strategies of devolution and power sharing; but it is only under very exceptional conditions that the reverse takes
place and a federal system generates a de-federalizing reform. In order for uphill reforms to materialize, some actors (federal states, the electorate, members of a duopoly of political parties,
parliaments, nation states) must be willing to disempower themselves, whereas they stand to gain
power when reforms are adopted in the opposite direction.
4
Lindblom (1982) analyses the market as a mechanism "for repressing change through an automatic punishing
recoil". "The market might be characterized as a prison. For a broad category of political/economic affairs, it
imprisons policy making and imprisons our attempts to improve our institutions." (325, 329)
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(h) One limiting case of institutional change is "deinstitutionalization". Whereas all the previous
cases in this section have dealt with either the continuity of institutions or processes by which
one institutional pattern is replaced by another one, the case of deinstitutionalization is special in
that rules are being abandoned without being replaced by some alternative institutional pattern.
Social action that used to be governed by binding rules now becomes - and is, by some, recommended to be made - a matter of unrestrained, inventive, and unilateral ad hoc decision making,
including the making of decision on which rules (if any) are to be invoked and adopted, if perhaps only on the spot and for the time being.
It is interesting and arguably symptomatic to follow the use of the term "deinstitutionalization"
in both positive and normative social science. The earliest use I was able to detect stems from the
late seventies, when it was introduced by specialists on the reform of psychiatric institutions (in
the wake of the Italian Basaglia debate). In that usage, deinstitutionalization was equivalent to
dehospitalization, which was both observed as a trend and (arguably somewhat frivolously) recommended as a reform strategy. From this highly specialized usage the term spread to other social services (such as the rehabilitation of drug users and criminals) and to social policy studies
in general.5 From there it was adopted as a key analytical concept by specialists in the fields of
sociology of the family (Tyrell 1988), leisure activities, and religion. In the 90ies, the career of
the concept continued in such diverse field as education and vocational training, development
studies, organization and management, the economics of transformation societies, political culture (including the development of voting behavior and political parties), the formation of political elites, political decision making (e. g., through ad hoc committees rather than constituted
parliamentary committees), international relations, and new types of military conflict, which are
no longer exclusively carried out by institutional actors such as states and armies. Other phenomena emerging in the institutionally uncharted terrain include "non-governmental" and "nonprofit" organization which are symptomatically designated in negative terms, i. e. in terms of
what they are not.
5
The earliest book length treatment in which the concept plays a central role is Lerman 1981
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In fact, we can observe in many of these fields symptoms of structural change and institutional
decomposition, the common denominator of which might be described as the erosion of encompassing rules, stable hierarchies, consolidated patterns of specialization and cooperation, hegemonic notions of normal patterns of the life course, and widely recognized frameworks of constraints. Needless to say, such erosion is not just widely observed, but also welcomed and promoted by the proponents of two ascendant public philosophies: On the one hand, libertarian varieties of social, economic, and political post-modernism with their standard suspicion that institutions are mostly pretexts for rent-seeking, or rigidities interfering with efficiency. On the other
hand, communitarian social philosophies and political doctrines with their emphasis on moral
communities, identities, and the neo-Tocquevillean belief that what is needed for the coordination of social action is not so much institutions (with their implicit dangers of centralization and
majority tyranny)6 as the revitalization of community virtues and resources such as "social capital". So it is unsurprising that the kind of social scientists who are interested in the study, as well
as the fair and appropriate design, of institutions often show sympathies with left-of-center liberal republicanism, in Europe better known as social democracy.7
It is also worth noting that, while the concern with institutions, their stability and credibility has
been a typical concern of conservative political thinkers, this concern seems now to have shifted
its political base to the political left, while economic and political libertarians have adopted and
made use of (some of) the political left's principled skepticism and suspicions concerning the
illegitimate social power that is built into, as well as hidden by, institutions. The reverse side of
the anti-institutional libertarian medal is of course the claim that power should be used openly
and to its full extent, and that its free exercise should not be interfered with by institutional constraints. Should this happen, it is no longer institutions which "structure politics" and "shape who
wins and who loses"; it is power, sheer and naked, for the understanding of which institutionalist
approaches may be no longer needed nor helpful.
6
cf. Berger and Neuhaus
7
Bo Rothstein (1998) is an example.
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One concluding remark. In the 90ies, the concept of "totalitarianism" has been revived and employed in the retrospective historical and comparative analysis of both the Nazi and the Stalinist
regimes. As to the former, it has been argued by contemporaries of the National Socialist regime
(such as Franz Neumann and Sebastian Haffner) that this regime represented an extreme form of
"deinstitutionalization". Not only lacked it a constitution, it even lacked a succession rule for its
top leadership, as well as even the most rudimentary set of rules specifying the working relations
between the four rival power centers of state, army, party and industry. Everything that happened
was based on decisions, virtually nothing on rules with any meaningful binding power, to say
nothing about legal rights. Something similar might be argued concerning Stalin's Soviet Union.
Both of these cases serve to demonstrate, if in somewhat different ways, how the "fearful naturalness" of human action can unfold due to the radical erosion of institutions.
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